You may have been told our

There are a couple of things that can propel you into the vast world of VO that many of our coaches (who are all voice actors and were once in your shoes) have suggested.

• Throw your ego out the door because there’s always room for improvement. Ok, keep your ego intact because you need it for your self-confidence (which is a must in the VO industry) but don’t assume because you’ve taken a few workshops that you have the chops now. You need to train and practice on a regular basis, just like an athlete, just like a musician, just like a professional chef. Beyonce didn’t make it to the top and then just stop and let the fruits of her labor work for her. She still practices, rehearses and continues perfecting it all. Laying down some cash for proper voice-over training with coaches may feel costly at the time, but you have to consider that those sessions will pay for themselves after you’ve had a few job offers, which ideally you will if you keep working on improving your skills. A voice coach will take you out of your comfort zone and help you to grow as a voice actor in ways that you wouldn’t otherwise on your own. The best part of working with a coach is that it’s fun!
• Make it happen, don’t wait for it to happen. Well, there’s some waiting involved after you submit auditions of course, but I’m talking about being proactive and sharing your enthusiasm for your new career endeavors with everyone. The more people who know you’re getting into voice acting, the more likely you are to find work. Networking is huge and although you may cringe at the idea of it, again, it’s a step outside your comfort zone which can potentially bring results. This can also mean getting your business cards made, launching your website, your business Facebook page, and your LinkedIn profile. It means cold calls and emailing prospective clients. Prepare yourself for rejection and take it with a grain of salt when it happens. Remember that a rejection doesn’t mean you don’t have talent, it means you didn’t fit the voice description of what the client had in mind.
• Setting realistic goals helps you with time management. It can feel overwhelming to embark on a voice acting career. If you’re anything like me when you feel overwhelmed you shut down and don’t accomplish anything except accumulating a YouTube history of funny cat videos. Now as entertaining as that is, it’s not going to bring you anything but guilt later on for not getting anything done. So, set goals for yourself and I’m talking realistic goals. Not goals like- Send auditions this week. No, that’s too broad and too vague. Get detailed with your goals and ask someone to hold you accountable. This could be the voice-over coach that you’ve invested in. Setting goals will ideally teach you how to organize your time as well. What helps me is to use my Google calendar as my guiding light. I write my goals into the time and day slots that I want to get them done. When I do that, I usually achieve said goals. If I just think it and assume I’ll get it done, it doesn’t happen. In that case, what gets done is more accumulation of cat videos. With setting goals and practical organization of your time, it can be helpful to create a routine for yourself so that you’re dedicating a set amount of hours each day to starting your voice acting career.
• A professional demo and high-quality equipment are key. I cannot stress enough how important a professional demo is. Imagine you’re interviewing someone for a job and they show up in ripped jeans with their hair askew. Would you hire that person based on your first impression? Unless it’s for a heavy metal music booking company, probably not. Your demo is your prospective client’s first impression of you. If there’s background noise or the sound is muffled or you’re popping your p’s too much, that’s going to reflect poorly on you and what the client assumes your capabilities are. Get into a studio with a producer and director so that you can take advantage of their expertise. Don’t forget that we can help you with that too!

If after reading this article, you’re still feeling apprehensive and not jazzed enough, here are some books that I recommend to get you off your tush and into the world of voice acting!

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks

You’re a Badass at Making Money by Jen Sincero

We always enjoy hearing your feedback, so join the conversation and see what’s trending about Such A Voice!

We also provide more tips about how to get started with your voice acting career on our YouTube channel. We even have a video for this post, so you can hear the blog author, Bekka Burton, in action. Check it out below: 

                                                                                                   About the Author

Bekka Burton is a copywriter, scriptwriter and copy editor at Such A Voice. She’s also an English Language teacher forcing fun grammar activities onto unsuspecting students in Barcelona, Spain. She’s currently studying an online Diploma course for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from Trinity College in London and will be pursuing a Master’s in Linguistics in Fall 2018. When she’s not studying, writing, editing or teaching, she’s sure to be found hiking mountains, reading books, and eating her way through many European cities.

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1. Give yourself permission to talk about your work. Ultimately, even though you’re talking about you, this isn’t about you. This is about how your voice adds value to someone else’s project. So, let’s ditch the idea that talking about ourselves is bad. Let’s instead look at it from this perspective: if you don’t tell people how to view your work, they will either a) ignore you or b) come up with their own point of view (which might not jive with your own).

Next, we need to make time to do this work. For many of us, marketing and branding is not second nature and we’d rather get a root canal than do this. Let’s change that! Remind yourself that marketing helps you to invite opportunities to do what you love: perform VO! Everytime you share what you do in a clear and effective way with the people who are in a position to hire you, the more opportunities you will have to audition. That will only mean more opportunities for you to book work, which means…cha ching! Yay!

2.  Make the time for marketing your voice-over skills. Literally schedule time into your calendar. If you’re just getting started, it’s going to take a little more time to ramp up. I’d recommend an hour a day for the first month. As you gain more experience and confidence, you might only need a few hours a week. Soon, you’ll be able to do this in as little as an hour (or less) per week! This takes time, so be patient. Schedule marketing into your calendar so you know you have carved out the time to do the work.

3.  Define what success looks like and track your progress. This can be a specific list of outcomes you post somewhere visible. It can be a spreadsheet you update daily, weekly, or monthly. It needs to be measurable and specific.

These first three steps allow you to develop a mindset and framework that will help you get off the couch and get comfortable marketing your VO work.

4. Get clear on what your brand is. Just like your VO training has taught you to dissect scripts and figure out who you’re talking to, what point you’re getting across, and how you’re doing it, you need to figure this out for your brand. If you need some tips and tricks on this, read through Cultivating Your Brand as a Voice Over Artist or 5 Steps to Discovering Your Personal Brand as an Actor. For many of you, this takes some time, introspection, and research. Give yourself the time to process this (but also give yourself a deadline to get it done).

Once you know your brand, it’s time to start networking. It can be in-person or via email, social media, etc. That’s why it’s important to do the following:

5. Connect with people. This is where the rubber meets the road and where most VO actors start to get uncomfortable. Networking is gross and icky, right? WRONG! Networking is the opportunity to connect with people, share your goals, and share how your voice-over skills add value to the projects you want to audition for and ultimately book. Networking is about building relationships and communicating with others. The best person to tell the world about what you do best is YOU. The only way to let them know is to tell them.

6. Don’t be afraid to ask for and/or hire help. Graphic design is not my specialty so I hired people who can do that part for me. You might be amazing at graphic design, but you may really need a push when it comes to articulating your brand in words. Maybe you need to find a copywriter to help you clarify things verbally. When you’re first starting out, you may not have a big budget to work with, but trying to do everything (especially when you just have no love or skill for certain tasks) is a recipe for getting overwhelmed and procrastinating. Carve out a budget for marketing (the same way you do with your VO training), so that you can hire help on a regular basis. You can also consider trading services with someone. Create a team to help you delegate these tasks and allow yourself to focus on what you do best.

7. Find a buddy. Accountability partners are great for keeping us on track towards accomplishing our goals, whether it’s working out or booking more VO gigs. (Scientifically proven, people.)   It’s helpful to have another person encourage and push you to get a task done. Need help finding a buddy? Maybe start with a classmate from that SAV Master Class you took or a VO buddy you met in a workshop.

8. Check in regularly with yourself. Remember where you wrote your goals down? Once a week, check in and see how you’re progressing towards those outcomes. Ask yourself:

• What went well?
• What did I accomplish this week? Any wins (big or small)?
• What could I have done better? How can I fix that for next week?
• What do I need to complete next week so that I stay on track?

Checking in with yourself or your accountability partner gives you a moment to digest the work you’re doing and make adjustments so you can be even more nimble in the future.

9. Celebrate! When you hit those milestones you’ve defined as your markers of success, take a moment to celebrate that win. It doesn’t have to be a blow out party, just something that allows you to draw energy and momentum from your success so you can move onto the final step.

10. Lather, Rinse & Repeat to put that nose of yours back to the grindstone and keep at it. Marketing your voice-over skills effectively takes time and practice. It gets easier with time, as you start to learn what works and what doesn’t work for you and your VO biz.

You might be wondering, “How long does all this take? This feels like work.” It is, but it’s also fun, liberating, and amazing when you start to see the results of your hard work gaining traction. You can set this process up in 4-6 weeks if you are disciplined. I recommend keeping marketing and outreach an ongoing part of your business process. As you gain experience and confidence, you’ll be able to execute on your marketing in a few hours a week and revisit your strategies on an annual or semi-annual basis.

When you decided to start taking VO classes, you most likely were starting from zero. It was challenging, maybe even scary. Eventually, you got comfortable and started growing your voice-over skills. Getting cozy with the business side of your VO business is much the same. Embrace the challenge and get off that couch, my friends! You got this.

Now I want to hear from you: How will you use these ten steps to kickstart marketing your voice-over skills in 2018? Comment below or share your thoughts with me on twitter @diamondsong.

Also, check out our VO Pro Membership and the Such A Voice blog for more tips about how to perfect your voice-over skills!

About the Author

As a voice actor, Ratana’s voice can be heard in numerous commercials (Vail Resorts, Fantastic Sam’s and others), video games (Skylanders: Giants), animation (Daddy, I’m a Zombie, Mummy, I’m a Zombie), as well as many industrial narration projects. A self professed “nerd,” she’s also a lifetime learner who constantly seeks new resources to keep her skills sharp. In addition to performing as a voice actor, Ratana coaches VO for Such A Voice. You can find her professional voice-over work at: ratana.net.

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Ra is not afraid to bring everything he is to a script… and his life reads like a page from the movie Straight Outa Compton.

Ra always knew that he was different.

From the time he was 10 years old, the inner city streets of Los Angeles held no appeal for Ra.  While other boys in his L.A.  neighborhood were slipping into gangs and violence, Ra opted to stay in his room and dream.

“I felt that [the gang lifestyle] was too limiting. I always thought differently than everyone else.  I wanted more.” – Ra

With Ice Cube, Tupac, and Bone Thugs-n-Harmony blasting from his radio,  Ra began turning his feelings and experiences into songs.  Not only did music come naturally to Ra, but he taught himself how to use ProTools to record and mix his music. The result is rap that’s deeper, more heartfelt and spiritually inspiring than most.

“…you just have to wake up and do you.” — from This is My Story, by Ra Palacio

With undeniable musical talent, Ra pursued the dream of becoming a rap star, but after a few years decided he didn’t want the lifestyle that went with it.  So Ra packed up and moved out of L.A. and took a job with a medical device company in Orange County. He got married, had a couple of kids and figured his dream of performing was over. But dreams, like crying babies, can only be ignored for so long…….

When his company formed a basketball team, the organizer of the league asked him to voice an ESPN style podcast that was broadcast to the entire company of 4,000 plus people. After hearing Ra’s voice, an astonished VP said, “you shouldn’t be here Ra, you should be doing voiceover.”

“I just started Googling voiceover classes and found Such A Voice…” – Ra

One day, while watching The Croods with his 4 year old daughter, a movie short came on about voice over actors who worked out their home studios, and the lightbulb went off in Ra’s head; “I knew I could do that, so I just started Googling voiceover classes and found Such A Voice.”  And the rest, as they say, is history.

In just a year, Ra has developed a sophisticated level of voiceover, which he credits to applying acting skills to the delivery; “like you’ve said, I don’t deliver the lines until I feel them.”

“…I don’t deliver the lines until I feel them.”

With The Beast audition (and subsequent booking), Ra chose to use the approach of a self-reflecting voice inside the driver’s head; “ I asked myself, what does a voice inside my head sound like? How would I feel about driving this car? I knew I had to be the dangerous part of this guy’s personality. I got very close to the mic and envisioned that it was the driver’s ear.”

“…I knew I had to be the dangerous part of this guy’s personality. I got very close to the mic and envisioned that it was the driver’s ear.”

Ra is now doing voiceover full time and auditions every day, and says: “You have to have an undying passion for it [voiceover] because the rejection can be hard. I used to worry about what the spot was supposed to sound like. Now I’m just me.”

If you want to know more about Ra, visit: www.ravoiceover.com 

You can also email him at: ravoiceover@gmail.com

What’s your story? Email me, at nancywilson@suchavoice.com, and we may feature you in an upcoming article!

Nancy Wilson is a busy voice-over actor in Los Angeles and is currently training with the legendary comedy group ‘The Groundlings’. She just booked the role of “mom” in SAG/AFTRA’s Old Time Radio show, Father Knows Best. You can find her on Facebook and on her website: www.nancywilsonvo.com.

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